British Open: Mark Selby to face John Higgins in Sunday’s final

Mark Selby will face fellow four-time world champion John Higgins in the final of the British Open on Sunday.

World number five Selby overcame Northern Ireland’s Mark Allen 6-3 in a hard-fought semi-final in Cheltenham on Saturday.

The Englishman will now take on Higgins after the Scot beat Oliver Lines 6-0 earlier to reach his first ranking event final since April 2022.

Selby produced a break of 105 on the way to a 3-0 lead in the second semi-final, and then led 4-1, before world number three Allen fought back.

The 38-year-old from Antrim, who made a maximum 147 break during Friday’s quarter-final win over world number one Judd Trump, hit a 130 as he cut the deficit to 4-3.

But Selby, 41, found breaks of 95 and 77 to secure victory and reach his first final since losing to Mark Williams in last year’s British Open title match.

Currently ranked 99th in the world, 29-year-old Englishman Lines was playing in his first semi-final and had chances in most of the frames.

But Scot Higgins secured each one, his highest breaks of 64 and 67 coming in the last two frames.

At the start of the week, the four-time British Open winner dropped out of the world’s top 16 for the first time since 1995 but will climb back up to at least 14th.

The 49-year-old now has the chance to become the oldest winner of a ranking event since Ray Reardon in 1982, and to win his first since the 2021 Players Championship.

“I have not won silverware for a few years and I just love the feeling of being the last man standing, that’s why I keep going,” Higgins told the World Snooker Tour.

“I am going to have a monumental game tomorrow. I’ll give it everything.

“There have been points in the last couple of years where I have felt that I am not good enough to compete against these guys and get to the finals. I will savour it.”

Higgins became only the second player to make 1,000 career centuries at the English Open last week, and Judd Trump became the third as he lost to Allen in the British Open quarter-finals on Friday.